unfortunately canceled: A perfect body is an embarrassing body – 30 years sixpackfilm

Thu March 26, 2020, 15:30 h
Diagonale Graz / Schubertkino 2

sixpackfilm was founded in 1990 to organize a comprehensive (one of the first of its kind) found footage film show at the Stadtkino. After its great success, we expanded the aim of the association to include the establishment of a sales organization for Austrian artistic films of all styles.

30 years later, sixpackfilm is an internationally established world sales and distribution organization that sends 40 - 50 new films around the world to festivals every year. The conception of events is still an important part of our public relations work for innovative films from Austria, but we also present international film art in Vienna. In this anniversary year, the Austrian Film Museum (Michael Loebenstein, Jurij Meden) and sixpackfilm (Brigitta Burger-Utzer) are once again curating a large-scale show with films from "found material". Since the 1990s, more and more filmmakers have discovered the beauty and expressiveness of foreign images, which not only convey history(ies), but are often also history. The birthday program during the Diagonale 2020 is a small foretaste of this.
It offers female handwriting around the latest work by Deborah Stratman. Vever (for Barbara) updates abandoned film projects by Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer in equal measure and brings them into a contemporary postcolonial discourse.

The title of the program is taken from the eloquent quote by Jean-Luc Nancy in Sabine Marte's wonderful Diagonale trailer '11. As always, she constructs a cinematic or performative structure around an artistic text: in Do we need to have an accident? she cuts scenes from countless Hollywood films with the appropriate language fragments to create three surreal narratives.
In Lezzieflick, Nana Swiczinsky uses morphing to deconstruct sexual scenes between women that simulate lesbian eroticism in hetero porn.
At the last Locarno Film Festival, The Giverny Document by Ja'Tovia Gary rightly won the prize for best film in the "Moving Ahead" section. She uses the medium of film as a radical, multi-faceted statement for the visibility and personification of black women's bodies in public spaces in Europe, in New York and finally on stages such as those performed by Nina Simone.
Finally, Mara Mattuschka rages as an extraterrestrial giantess on our planet and triggers apocalyptic catastrophes before she uses the Eiffel Tower for her sexual satisfaction.

Program and text Brigitta Burger-Utzer